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She had called him here to say goodbye.
There was a nearly palpable finality to it. A relief mixed with a fierce terror. The last chapter of a relationship that had sustained him through the darkest and most joyful times of his life.
He didn’t know how he would ever live without it.
Without her.
There had been too much that had passed between them for this moment to be anything but paralyzing in its intensity.
His heart had beat in time with hers for so long he could scarcely imagine a time where they were no longer in sync. No longer an indelible part of each others’ days.
Chakotay took a steadying breath, squaring his shoulders as he stood outside her door. He would do this, survive this, for her. After everything they had been through together, he owed her that much.
And, if he was truly honest with himself, he needed closure too. Needed to feel the harsh blow of reality snuff out a dream he had carried in his heart for years.
Kathryn was standing stiffly at the viewport when he entered, gazing out at the stars. The lights were low, earth shining bright in the distance. A beacon of a forgone hope. Hope that came too late for the two of them.
He took a moment to stand back and take her in. Her position was strategic, he knew. The firm stance. The shadowed profile. The full uniform tucked and buttoned to Starfleet perfection. She was always so damned unflappable, while he, on the other hand, felt so close to unraveling. He ran a hand absently over the front of his jacket, feeling the uneven bumps of wrinkles beneath his palm, the small edge of a tear in the fabric. Marks of imperfection after the past few endless days.
Of course they would be this way at the end. The Maquis and the Captain. The flawed and the infallible.
It had always been magnetic between them. Two opposites rendered together by fate. Sometimes the pull toward each other was too overwhelming to ignore. Other times, with just the slightest shift, they were driven roughly apart. Just as they were now.
He couldn’t help the taut clench of his hands. The disoriented feeling he had at being here with her. It had been too long since he had been alone in a room with her like this. Dinners had been cancelled, late night cups of coffee avoided. The easy, soft comfort that existed between them had worn away until only the barest remnants of it remained.
Wearily, he ran a hand through his hair before settling, hands clasped behind him. The immeasurable, impossible feelings he had for this woman rattled his composure.
The distance between them felt incalculable in its vastness as the door closed quietly behind him. As if they had crossed a galaxy only to find themselves more lost than ever before.
“Chakotay.” Her voice was soft, but raspy, the strain of the last few days bleeding through. She rarely used his name like this anymore, usually opting for his rank. Starlight glinted sharply off the whiskey glass clasped in her hand.
He knew for sure then, that she was suffering.
His first instinct was to cross to her. To grab the glass and hurl it against the wall. To watch the shards splinter like the last of his restraint. To rage against everything that had made this moment a cruel joke instead of a culminating victory.
His second instinct was to kiss the taste from her mouth.
But he did neither. He was used to tucking the feelings away. Pushing them down in the hollow of his chest where they would simmer and ache late at night.
Because she had boundaries. Parameters.
And so he simply waited. He was used to that.
For Kathryn, watching him standing uneasily in her quarters, his eyes wary, felt like a condemnation. She braced herself with a hand on the railing by the viewport, swallowing down her nerves and steadying her voice.
Even though she had practiced innumerable times, pacing the floor of her quarters with shaking hands and a pounding heart, the words still stuck in her throat. “I wanted to thank you for these past years. For everything you did for Voyager. For the crew.” Her words sounded trite, too small for everything they encompassed. She traced a finger over the rim of her glass and threw back a swallow to soothe the sting.
She couldn’t meet his eyes. If she did, she knew she would crumble. She needed to do this. To thank him and give him her blessing. At first she had been jealous when she heard he had moved on. Blindly, painfully jealous even though she knew she had no right to be. But after she screamed and cursed god and the whole damn Delta Quadrant, she felt the emptiness settle in. There was no room in her left for spite anymore.
“You did it Kathryn. You got them home. I never doubted you.” He told her quietly, with the same loyalty that had bolstered her across the miles.
The resoluteness of his words nearly undid her. The unwavering faith. The devotion she never deserved.
She turned back to the stars, her gaze searching and distant. “You should have...doubted me. I let you down enough times out there.”
It was an admission that cost her more than he knew. It wasn’t just about the ship.
It was about them.
She knew what her decisions, and her decisions alone, had cost the two of them. When she had pushed him away again and again. When she chose to be a martyr over a human being.
Chakotay knew she hadn’t made a single choice out here lightly. She had agonized over each one of them. When it came to the crew, he had never questioned her resolve. That inferno of focus bordering on obsession. To uphold the values of Starfleet. To save the crew she thought she damned.
“Seven years.” Her voice shook slightly. Another crack in the facade that had him taking a tentative step forward. To the edge of the yawning abyss between them. “It was too long.”
“We’re here now-”
She turned, finally meeting his gaze, steel blue eyes focusing on his. He could see the combination of contrition and self-doubt swirling in them.
So this wasn’t just goodbye, he realized.
It was atonement.
She gestured vaguely to the table. “Feel free to pour yourself a drink. I sure as hell needed one.”
He did, striding slowly acrossing the room, if only to give her the privacy of his turned back. He knew she was struggling with whatever she needed to say. His hand slid to the narrow neck of the bottle, the movement making him remember hundreds of other times they had done this.
A drink in her quarters amid different stars.
“It's all those moments, Chakotay. The vectors in time. You go left or right, choose the easy path or the just one.” He could hear the darkness of the guilt seeping into her voice. “I can’t help but see all the ways I could have done it differently.”
He poured the amber liquid slowly, watching it swirl and settle. The tremor in his hands was visible only to himself. It was the price of loving a complicated, conflicted woman he had always been unable to protect. There wasn’t anything he could tell her that would assuage her doubts. No way to give her the absolution she wanted. “We all made choices out there, Kathryn. You. Me. Everyone,” he paused, turned again to face her, his jaw set, “You made the right ones.”
Even the ones about us, he thought.
The laugh that rolled up from her throat was tinged with self-depreciation. It sliced through the air, cutting him to the bone. He would have given up anything, in that moment, to take this burden from her. To let her know she was always enough.
“I took seven years from all of you.”
It was direct. A raw admission. He knew this was her act of contrition and it clawed at him. She didn’t have any idea how wrong she was.
“You gave me my life back,” he answered firmly. She would never know she gave him everything. Even when she held back, even when she pushed him away. She had still saved him.
It was so damn necessary to him that, at the very least, she understood that.
“If we had gotten home after one year, half this crew would be rotting in a prison. Myself included.” He took a drink, rolled the tense muscles in his shoulders. It was a reality he didn't often ponder. The life he would have had if he had never worn the uniform again. It felt so distant now he could hardly imagine it.
They rarely spoke about this, the what ifs. He knew it was excruciating for her, talking about her choice to destroy that array. That she blamed herself for 150 lives put on hold. He felt the familiar vice tighten around his heart at her guilt.
“If we’d gotten home in two, I’d be married to Mark. Riding a desk at headquarters.” She began to pace slowly. There was a stiffness to her movements, a tension he longed to unfurl.
“Sometimes I wonder if I wanted it too much. The unknown. The adventure.” She took another drink, longer this time. As the glass returned to her side she wiped the back of her hand across her mouth.
The gesture tugged at his heart. It was so human. So Kathryn.
“Did I keep us out here longer due to my own damned ambition?” she muttered, “Was I too blind to the opportunities to get home faster?” There was torment in her eyes as she asked him.
“No.”
He would have followed her into the jaws of hell. No matter how long it took.
She sighed heavily, the weariness sinking from her breath to her bones. He could see he hadn't brought her much comfort. Instinctively, his free hand curled in a tight fist. His body leaned forward slightly, pulled by the force of his need to touch her. Too much time, too many parameters.
“But you’re right. We can’t change it now.” A wry smile touched her mouth. Levity in the face of regret. “At least not again.”
He offered her a soft smile of his own in return. It wasn’t much to give, but it was all he thought she would accept. And, if nothing else, he had always been here to give her what she needed.
It dawned on Kathryn in that instant that she might not see him smile at her again. Not in the way he had out here. As if he didn’t see all the flaws and cracks that she held together with a uniform and stubborn pride. She needed him to go before she crumbled.
Setting down her glass carefully on a table, she forced a smile and turned to face him fully, “Is your packing done? I still have some to do.” She nodded at the bits scattered around the floor. It looked inconceivably small. A life packed into a few industrial crates. “I best get to it. I just wanted to thank you again...and wish you well.”
She took a deep inhale, her back aching from being held so straight. It was a struggle to keep her eyes friendly, easy. To tamp down on the reckless urge to go to him.
The kindest thing she could do was to let him go.
He didn’t want this, she reminded herself, didn’t want her. Why would he ever want someone who had never given him what he needed?
Chakotay found himself nearly staggering, the words striking his stomach like a blow. She was asking him to leave.
Searing pain ripped through his chest, his vision blurring slightly. He heard his own voice, detached and distant, “Goodbye, Kathryn. I’ll see you at disembarkment.”
He knew, if he left, this was the unconditional end. It very nearly leveled him. In a few hours they’d walk off this ship, and down a path that would drive them further apart. He didn't know if there was room for friendship in the midst of everything he felt for her. The contradiction of innumerable emotions. It was excruciating just to think about it.
Her last words made him stumble, a hand reaching out to steady himself on the doorframe. “What if--,” a long pause, the silence fraught with waves of longing, “What if we had gotten home at the end of the third year?”
It was so damned unexpected he was speechless. A lump rose unbidden in his throat as he remembered her then. Blue eyes sparkling at him over the console, her hair long and soft around cheeks flushed with the thrill of a new discovery.
He was so deep in love with her then. The hope of a future still tangible and alluring.
"How can you ask me that?" he choked out. His eyes were burning. If he didn't leave he was afraid he would sink to his knees.
The vulnerability in her voice reverberated in the stillness. "Because when I think about the life I could have had-- it's not the one with Mark I'm missing."
He could have said something flippant. Told her he didn't know what he would have done. But the lie died on his lips.
He owed them both the truth.
He didn’t turn, only spoke the words to the heavy air around them, his face averted and in shadow. “I would have kissed you in the middle of the bridge. I’d have kissed you long and hard, and not given a damn who was watching.”
He heard the choked sob that escaped her throat, and it gave him a hope he thought died a long time ago. A hope that had first sparked when she reached out a trembling hand across a table in a small gray shelter.
“I’d have picked you up and carried you back here. Made love to you in that bed. Asked you to marry me after you woke up in my arms for the first time.” He shuddered, closing his eyes briefly as the image flashed through his mind.
It felt like a confession. A prayer.
It was everything he never told her. Everything he had kept buried in the recesses of his heart, because he knew she was never ready.
He could hear the ragged edge of her breathing behind him, leaving him terrified to turn around and face her.
But he did.
There were tears running freely down her cheeks, her arms hugged tightly around her middle. As if she was holding herself together. When her eyes met his, the blatant regret he saw in them pulled him under.
He walked to her with slow, measured steps, his glass falling to the floor unheeded with a soft thud. His heart was racing the entire time, blood roaring in his ears. And then they were toe to toe, breath to breath. She smelled like whiskey and coffee. And she looked more beautiful than she had when he first took the fall.
Those same blue eyes that pulled him back from a path he had been stumbling down without direction or reason were gazing at him again. Full of so much fragile hope.
And he knew he had always been hers.
Even when he was still Maquis.
Even when she could only be Starfleet.
"I didn't think you wanted that—wanted us—anymore Kathryn," he said slowly, his eyes holding hers. He didn’t touch her. Not yet. He needed to be sure before he did. There were so many other times he had thought this might happen, only to find himself alone behind an unscalable boundary. He wasn’t sure he could survive her rejection again.
"It doesn't matter—"
"—Like hell it doesn't. It's the only thing that matters." He nearly growled it at her. Her nearness and the wounded look in her eyes destroyed the last vestiges of restraint, and a flash of anger sparked in him. He'd be damned if he let her keep sacrificing. Sacrificing herself. Sacrificing them. He was so tired of being her absolution.
"You're with some else," she said softly, her lips a breath from his. He could see the stars reflecting in her eyes.
"There could never be anyone else." He crushed her to him, his mouth taking hers with nearly brutal force. A kiss that was all heat and silk, hard and demanding.
She could feel him shaking with need and desperation as he gathered her close. The thought that she had caused him this pain had her heart clenching in her chest.
"Tell me— Tell me you want this." He was kissing her, over and over. His lips captured hers between words. "Goddamn it Kathryn. Tell me right now."
She wanted him more than her next breath. She always had. How could he have ever doubted it?
The relief splintered through her, bright and almost painful. He was still here. He wanted her, though god only knew why.
And, finally, she gave herself to him.
She melted against him, her hands settling on his chest, one over his heart. The steady rhythm against her palm soothed and excited at once. He felt so good, so solid. Indulgently, she pressed closer, breathing in his familiar scent. For the first time in years, she let go of the Captain, and let herself just be a woman in the arms of the man she loved.
“I do. I want this. I love you.” She cupped his cheeks, her thumbs stroking the bristle of his jaw. She saw all the emotions flash through his eyes. The relief and the tenderness.
Chakotay drew in a rough-sawn breath, his vision blurring as he pressed a kiss to her temple, her hair. Three words falling from his lips against her skin. He drew his hands over her back, her hips, his touch gentling as the joy settled over him. All the anger and the bitter disappointment scattered like dust in the wind. Nothing else mattered. Only this moment. With her.
There would be more words. Apologies. Declarations. But for now, there was only love. Her eyes were damp, but shining as she asked him a familiar question, “Are you with me?”
He brought his mouth to her ear, his voice a tender whisper, “Always, Kathryn. Always.”